A Selfie-Helper, and Other Apps You Should Be Using

If Instagram has a new app, you should probably download it. Everyone’s favorite photo-sharing platform now has its own GIF-creation feature with Boomerang… or, at least, sort of. Like Facebook’s new moving profile photos, Boomerang takes short burst videos and replays them in a loop. Which, essentially, for all intents and purposes, is a GIF (OK, OK, fine—it creates a GIF-like effect).

Selfies can be obnoxious. But the lower quality of the front-facing camera isn’t doing them any favors. The lighting is poor, the photos are grainy—it’s not a good look. SelfieX puts the selfie camera back where it belongs, with the primary camera on the back of the phone. SelfieX gives you vocal directions to make sure you’re in the frame, and once you get the position right, the app will automatically take a picture without you having to locate the shutter and stay in the frame at the same time. It’s a simple solution to your bad front-facing selfie problem.

There are quite a few web apps that keep you from accessing distractions like Facebook, Twitter, or the greatest time-suck of all, email. Offline Time is another one competing for your attention (and attentions needs). It’s a Mac download that lets the application sit on your menu bar, where you can toggle how long you want to avoid the fun parts of the Internet. Are you strong enough?

BJ Novak (remember Ryan from The Office? That guy!) has a new app called The List—and that’s just what it is, a bunch of lists. You can create lists about anything you want: favorite dog breeds, best news stories of the week, maybe your favorite new apps (see what I did there?). You can search other people’s lists for ideas; it could easily be a popular travel companion (“Best desserts in Seattle”). Best of all, it’s much better than the app Novak’s character created.

Please approach this app with self-restraint and caution. If you have ever gone down a seriously dark hole and ended up scrolling through a enemy’s/ex’s/object of your affection’s Instagram and accidentally double-tapped a years-old photo, then you might want to try InstaSnoop. It lets you gratuitously browse someone’s account without leaving evidence of your momentary obsession. There really is nothing more frightening than getting a notification that the guy you just met liked a photo you posted eight months ago. So don’t be that person. Also, maybe hide your phone from yourself if you use this app too often.

See more between points A and B. Plot your route on the in-app maps and let experienced travelers tell you which detours are most worthy. No real agenda? Pick a premade itinerary and let the app lead the way.

Everything’s better with an awesome tour guide. Findery shows you not only nearby places but also notes left about them by others—personal stories, photos, tips, etc. Compose your own notes and keep them private or make them public.

Entertainment

Passing through nowheresville? Forget spinning the dial—TuneIn contains livestreams for 100,000 radio stations from around the world. Check in on the game from six states away. Goodbye, static and shock jocks. Hello, epic road trip soundtrack.

The best of the myriad podcast clients, Overcast helps you find new shows with simple directories and suggestions from Twitter. You can set all your favorite shows to download automatically, or just stream them a la carte. All of the features that used to be in-app purchase are now free, like speed controls and a voice booster.

If there’s no YouTube video to show you how to fix what’s wrong, this app will help you find a nearby mechanic at the right price. Openbay helps diagnose the problem and compare labor rates for the fix.

An iPhone GIF-Maker and 4 Other Apps You Should Be Using

How this didn’t already exist, I can’t be sure, but here we are: LiveGifs takes your fancy new Live Photos (courtesy of your fancy new iPhone 6 or 6s) and turns them into GIFs. While you may have thought your short, quickly looping videos already were GIFs, you were wrong—but now they can be, making them easier to share with messaging services.

Think of TapTag like geocaching without the promise of physical goods. This app lets you leave photos “tied” to a location, so when someone else using the app happens upon that same place, they’ll find the visual memento you left for them.

Many of our phones are just receptacles for way, way too many photos. Each time an OS upgrade comes through, we’re stuck with the unenviable task of getting rid of at least some of them. IceCream can help you with that process by showing you what’s taking up space, as well as what’s already been saved to the cloud, or allowing you to use its own service to do so.

Autocorrect deserves a cruel death (no one in the world ever wanted to type “ducking”), and SwiftKey might be able to deliver it. The third-party keyboard app is moving behind just its personal keyboard service with its new neural network keyboard, which uses artificial intelligence to better predict what it is you’re trying to say. This one is only available for Android… because iOS still thinks you don’t give a duck.

All the Apps You Should Be Using to Rule Fantasy Football

If you’re anything like me, then you spent this weekend scrambling to manage multiple drafts from your phone, a maddening inconvenience marred by a dying battery and crappy connection. That means I’ll need all the help I can get, and a quick glance to see how my players will match up against opponents is a good start.

You’re pretty smart, but Watson is smarter—as in IBM’s super computer Watson. This new app is like a having multiple analysts at your dispense, consuming the various news circulating all week that you could have easily missed. Never again log in after a busy Thursday only to realize you didn’t know your starting running back was out.

What happens when Wall Street execs make a fantasy football app? PocketGM happens. This app lets you pull in teams from fantasy platforms to get an overall view on the state of the fantasy league. It can be particularly helpful when you’ve drafted a crap team and need to make some pick ups… (points to self).

Really, spring for this $5 app (I know, I know—$5) if you are managing more than two teams and if there are stakes involved. I learned my lesson by trying to manage three teams and a bet involving Four Loko years ago. If you haven’t reached that low yet, maybe this app could keep you from ever doing so.

A Smile Detector and Other Apps You Need to Be Using

Recho does one very simple, little thing: It lets you leave a voice message tied to a location. When other people using the app hit those coordinates, Recho will tell them there’s something to listen to. You can use the app to discover different “rechoes” around you, if you actively want to listen in on someone’s location-aware thoughts. You can also share interesting soundbytes with your Recho followers. It’s a little weird and novel, but ultimately a new way to think about digital exploring a place.

You should always do your research before heading into the great unknown. Parking, hours of operation, menus—all important intel. Visor looks into how crowded a spot is, a crucial factor for many of us deciding if that beer fest or restaurant opening is even worth it. Visor answers questions like “how long is the wait?” and “is there any parking?” so you can make a decision before leaving the comfort of your couch.

OK, bear with me on this one, because it’s not available to everyone, everywhere—yet. But the idea is interesting enough to talk about. GIGA Selfie is a promo from Tourism Australia that wants to replace the selfie stick. Here’s how it works: You stand on a GIGA platform, open the app to take a selfie, which then also prompts a long-distance camera some 360 feet to also take your photo, so that you don’t have to crane your arm to try and include the scenery and your precious mug. These GIGA-enabled platforms will be found throughout the country, so book your travel plans accordingly.

Brand apps usually aren’t worth a download, but Listerine Smile Detector actually has a heartwarming purpose. The app helps people who are blind or losing their sight “feel” smiles. The app uses facial recognition to find a face and then vibrates in the user’s hand to let them know that the person their talking with is smiling, a more subtle method than putting their hands on another person’s face, and enriching a conversation.

A Photo Editor With 5 Million Filters and Other Great Apps

Instagram’s 23 filters not enough? Infltr has infinity filters! (Sort of: 5 million, actually.) The app lets you shoot in a filter, and you simply tap the screen to change to a new one. If you enjoy swiping through all of a photo app’s options to decided on the perfect choice, you might become overwhelmed by Infltr’s 5 millions of filters. But there’s something refreshing about using an overlay you haven’t seen before. It will certainly break you out of your Mayfair dependency.

How no one combined Kanye and emoji into a standalone app until this point is a testament to how much we love plain old Unicode. You might think that Kanye has two modes (shrug and stone-faced), but Yemoji proves there is a Kanye expression for nearly every situation. Surprised Ye, sad Ye, angry Ye—it’s all there. If we could get a hair toss Ye, then it would really round things out.

Venmo is easily one of the best unintended social networks on the Internet. Scroll through the public feed of transactions sometime if you want to be simultaneously amused and terrified. Now Venmo is beta testing a groups feature, so you can easily pay for things with your friends using fun/lewd emoji in the description field.

Vertical video finally gets the home it deserves (which is not with giant black boxes around it on YouTube). There’s nothing flashy here: It’s just a nice, simple, unobtrusive home for vertical videos. As it should be.

Facebook Will Now Turn Your ‘Moments’ Into Video Slideshows

Back in June, Facebook introduced us to its Moments app, an A.I.-infused service that helped friends easily share photos they took while together or while at the same event. Moments is intended to be an antidote to all the “hey text/email/message me that picture” nonsense that typically follows a party or vacation.

Now, Moments is moving beyond simple stills: Facebook added a video feature that takes photos and turns them into customizable movies (or slideshows, rather). It sounds a little like Google Photos, in that these Moments videos will select the best photos. Google Photos’s Assistant feature can make you slideshows with a soundtracks, and also does a nice job of automatically choosing your best images to create other enhancements like GIFs and panoramas1. Facebook says the photos are chosen based on storytelling. “It’s primarily optimized for a diversity of photos so it can capture a beginning, middle, and end of the ‘story.’ It also chooses a personalized set of photos to select the ones you and your friends are in.” Eventually, this will improve to include Liked photos and make sure to keep duplicates out.

Here’s an example of what the videos look like:

The update is available today for iOS and Android.

1UPDATE 3:03 PM ET 08/25/15: This story originally said Google Photos’s Assistant feature did not include videos, but it does in fact sometimes create slideshows automatically.

A Super-Easy GIF-Maker and Other Essential New Apps

As if there weren’t enough GIFs on the Internet, now there can be more—and they can be of your face. The new app from Giphy makes it super-easy to GIF yourself or anyone around you, add some animated stickers, or make it a meme. Will you become the next viral GIF? Probably not, but that doesn’t make it any less fun.

Wondr lets you have anonymous chat sessions with your Twitter followers, which might sound horribly unnecessary, but could actually be a great crowdsourcing tool. If you want input from the very smart people who follow you who also might not want to be identified, Wondr boots up an anonymous discussion with ease. And you can also use it to let your followers chat with you—if you’re that cool.

This is just mean: Beep is for kids only, because the sound it uses as a notification is too high for us Olds to hear. The app’s splash page explains it’s great for “youngsters,” so clearly it was not made by a teen. The best reason to download Beep is to see if you are cool anymore, and also to annoy any obnoxious youth in your vicinity.

Golden Hour is a magical time—anyone who’s taken even one photography class has heard its praises sung. It’s when the sky gets all dusky and (surprise) gold, and everything looks like an angel threw up on it. Rizon calculates when this time is approaching, letting you know when the best time for shooting is. It lets you add multiple locations, too, so you can keep all your photog friends in the know.

4 New Apps You Should Use, From Shower Texts to Bar Roulette

Reddit’s r/showerthoughts is one of the Web’s best places for all of life’s most random ideas. If you want some of this content on demand, a new app called Shower Texts will send you one a day. It’s sort of like the occasional late-night messages you get from your stoner friend, but without typos or any obligation to reply.

Wander, originally a Tumblr-esque sort of travel bloggish site-app-thing has pivoted into a mobile app for travelers. It’s sort of like Instagram devoted entirely to travel and scenery photos, and uses highly visual user journals meant to inspire your weekend plans… or just give you a serious case of wanderlust.

Use this app with caution: Bar Roulette is an app that calls you an Uber and takes you to a surprise mystery bar. Now Uber already has a less than stellar reputation in regards to safety, so adding an unknown night life location into the mix certainly can’t make things better. However, if you’re feeling like you need a little spontaneity in your Friday night, this could be a fix. Just bring a friend.

4 New Apps You Should Be Using

Microsoft Translator

App browsing still doesn’t have quite the same cachet as window shopping, but it should—the sheer amount of time spent staring into our smartphones is indication enough that we very much care what’s going on inside. We’ve selected some new titles worth installing.

The Rap Genius rebranding continues with the launch of the Genius mobile app. The service has transitioned from hip hop lyric library to a annotated pocket guide to pop culture, which it’s showing off with a new look and more fully-fledged function. It’s available for iOS and Android now.

While Realmoji isn’t an app you can download directly to your phone, it is some of the most fun you’ll ever have texting with a bot. After you enter your phone number on the site, Realmoji will text you. Then, you just need to select an emoji of your choosing, and it will respond with a real photo that represents that emoji. Think of it as a photographic emoji interpreter.

This app runs on the Apple Watch and Android Wear, so plenty of you can just go ahead and skip to the next entry. Everyone else, welcome! The dream of speaking into your wrist and getting instant translations has been realized thanks to Microsoft, and the slick UI certainly doesn’t hurt the experience.

Google’s DeepDream technology has been mesmerizing the Internet since it launched, and now there’s an Android app so you can easily turn your mobile photos into trippy hallucinations. The app is currently only available for Android phones, but it’s coming to iOS soon.